


Games

by MrsHamill



Series: Sandman Crossover Project [14]
Category: The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Multiple Crossovers, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 22:18:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6027454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsHamill/pseuds/MrsHamill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mother against son. Pairing: Two-Edge/Delirium (Elfquest)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Games

**Author's Note:**

> Lori sicced this on me, but it took me a while to get around to it. While I thought Two-Edge with Del would be easy, it actually was much harder than I expected (I should have realized this, since the only other Delirium piece was just as difficult). Two-Edge was driven mad by his mother after she killed his father; before then, I had to assume he was a bright, intelligent (if not happy) boy. It's even in the story how she remembered the time she cracked her son's sanity. _shudder_ Not a nice lady at all.

* * *

The first time the strange girl came to him was just before that woman killed his father.

He never called Winnowill anything but _that woman_ or Winnowill, not after he began to grow up and realized how horrible she was. How evil she was. A mother is not supposed to be like that, he knew, somehow, he knew, even as a child, he knew. 

No, his father wasn't innocent of horrible things, but he wasn't like that woman was. His father knew what he knew, did what he knew, and was true to himself and his kind. It would never have occurred to him to do something like what Winnowill did, just for the fun of it. 

It wasn't like he loved her, not since he had been a baby. He'd wanted to, he'd tried to, but she was beyond love. He'd watched the rock-shaper fashion the small, barred room and didn't know what it was for, why it was there. He found out, of course, because that's where she put him when she didn't want him around, underfoot. When all he wanted was to be with his... with Winnowill. When she had plans to do something she knew was wrong.

At least, he hoped she knew it was wrong. But then again, he couldn't tell what was easier to take, thinking she did things without plan or that she had planned to do the awful things she'd done.

It made his head hurt to think of that question.

He'd cried when she put him into the cell, begged her to let him out, but she turned her back on his cries. He had heard the two of them - Winnowill and his father - yelling at each other from the small room, and cried harder. That was when the girl came to him.

Sometimes, she looked like a tall, slender troll. Others, she looked like a short, squat elf. He hadn't recognized the madness in her eyes until years later, when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in a still pond.

"They're not being very nice," she said, and he'd turned, surprised and frightened at the voice. 

"Who are you?" he'd stammered, shrinking back. He'd only seen one other elf, the rock-shaper, and one other troll, his father; she was new and something about her scared him.

"You don't have to be a-skeered, not of me." She giggled. Her eyes were different colors.

"Who are you?" he asked again.

"You can call me Del. I'd like for you to be my friend."

"I don't know who you are," he said, turning back to look outside his prison. The voices of that woman and his father were rising.

"I'm your friend, silly." She looked out through the bars. "She's really not very nice at all. I don't like her."

"I don't like her either," he'd murmured, rubbing his eyes hard. It didn't stop the burn.

"That's sad," she said. She squatted on the floor and rested her head on her bent knees. "Mothers are supposed to be good."

"I... I know." How did he know that? He'd only met a few other people in his short life, but somewhere in his heart, he knew that.

"You should complain about her."

"To who? There's nobody else."

"To that funny old bird guy. The one she calls _lord_."

"Oh." Yes, that was right, he'd heard her refer to someone called Lord Voll. "I don't know where he is, though."

"I could show you, if you wanted. Once she lets you out."

He had been about to accept her offer when his parents brought their fight into the chamber where he was. His father saw the bars that locked his son away and roared at Winnowill, pointing, accusing, condemning. He saw the fury in that woman's face before she lifted her hands. He knew, from prior experience that the same hands that could feel soft and gentle could deal pain beyond anything tolerable. He shouted a warning to his father, a plea to that woman, but it was too late.

Winnowill reduced his father to a burned-out cinder. Before her stunned, disbelieving, horrified son's eyes, she reduced his father to nothing but blackened bones and smoke.

He screamed. He cried and raged. He told her, he knew, he would not be an elf. Would be a troll, if this is what being an elf meant. He would go to her Lord Voll and tell him, show him what Winnowill had done, somehow, he would see her punished. She had killed his father!

But that woman wouldn't let him out. She left the blackened, rotting bones of his father on the floor a few feet from his cage and started on him. She fed him only enough food and water to keep him alive, and then she proceeded to torture him. She called it games. They went on like that for months... or at least he thought it was months. Maybe it was years. He couldn't tell, since he was always in the dark unless that woman came to him. He didn't remember a lot about that time, which might be a good thing.

One morning, he lifted his tear-encrusted eyelids to notice that the bones of his father were gone. He thought that might have been his first brush with insanity.

"She took them." It was the strange girl again. He hadn't seen her since his father had been killed.

"What did she do with them?" They were the only thing he had, the only sign of love and acceptance he'd ever had. "Where are they?"

"I don't know. And she won't tell you, I bet."

He collapsed on the floor, weeping, calling for his father.

"Well _that's_ not going to get you anywhere." He looked up at her strange face. "What you should do is find a way to hurt her back. You know. Make her pay."

"I can't! I can't get out of here. And even if I could, I couldn't do anything. She says I'm just a baby."

"Not anymore. You got big, but you'll never be as big as either of them. And there's lots of things you could do. I could help you. You belong to me now, anyway."

"Lots like what?"

"Well, don't you think it'd be neat to find out which was better, troll or elf?" She stared at him through her mismatched eyes and he shivered. "I bet you could find out a lot at King Guttlecraw's. Like how to make special weapons and things."

Winnowill came back then, and the strange girl vanished. But she'd left the seeds in his mind, and Winnowill watered them with her malice and hate. When they flowered into black, weeping roses, the girl came back, and he left with her, heading north.

Two-Edge hummed a rhyme as he walked away from pain into insanity, something about finding a key.


End file.
